If you cringe at NSA's methods of gathering dirt on world leaders, consider what the KGB had been gathering to achieve similar results. According to the Russian media, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on foreign leaders' excrement with the ambitious aim of constructing psychological portraits by analyzing their feces. Believe it or not, the story has passed the BBC smell test.

Chairman Mao became the first foreign leader whose stool was stolen by the KGB.

Retired KGB agent Igor Atamanenko, who claims he had uncovered this project while doing research in the archives of the Russian secret services, told the BBC correspondent that "in those days the Soviets didn't have the kind of listening devices which secret services do today. That's why our specialists came up with the most extravagant ways of extracting information about a person."

Stalin's head henchman and KGB chief, Lavrenti Beria, supervised the secret stool-spying operation and reported the results personally to Stalin.

In an interview with the Russian-language AIF, Atamanenko was more specific. According to him, this method was used for the first time in 1950, during Mao Zedong's visit to Moscow. Atamanenko claims that Mao and his comrades were made to wait ten days at the Kremlin reception before Stalin let them in. Some historians believe this was Stalin's way to establish dominance and bring the Chinese delegation down to size. But according to Atamanenko, Stalin himself waited that long for his agents to collect and analyze Mao's multiple stool samples for a psychological profile, so that the Soviet leader would know just what kind of man he was dealing with.

The KGB plumbers had reportedly customized Mao's toilet so the Chairman's stool was extracted to a secret box and delivered to the KGB secret lab by a special courier (one wonders if the courier's title included the words "stool pigeon").

The problem with that plan was that Mao didn't know how to use a toilet. According to the Kremlin guards assigned to the Chinese delegation, neither the Chairman nor any of the 50 other revolutionaries who accompanied him to Moscow knew the purpose of the white porcelain contraptions and used them as water fountains. Additionally, Mao spent his nights sleeping on the floor mat by the bed, while most of his fellow comrades slept in the closets because after years of hiding in the caves many of them had developed agoraphobia.

Mao's excrement was examined by a crack team of KGB analysts including endocrinologists, physiologists, immunologists, diagnosticians, psychologists, and neurologists. Having examined the resulting psychological portrait, Stalin finally met with Mao Zedong. He thanked his spy team saying, "Your conclusions were correct: this man is a radish. He's only red on the outside, but his inside is white." (The "white" reference had nothing to do with race; in the communist jargon of the day "white" meant "anti-red," as in the "White Army" that fought against the Red Army while wearing white uniforms.)

The veteran KGB agent also claims that Nikita Khrushchev, who assumed power in 1954, put an end to this and other similar secret KGB projects. But the Soviet visionary scientist behind this idea emigrated to Israel and soon wound up in America, where his research was picked up by the CIA and used to analyze Khrushchev's excrement during his visit to the United States in September, 1959.

Khrushchev's portable commode that accompanied him on his 12-day trip across America, which included New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Des Moines, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC, had been allegedly altered by the CIA to extract the Soviet leader's stool samples. The toilet at Camp David, where Khrushchev met with President Eisenhower, had also been modified, says Atamanenko.

Nikita Khrushchev tries Pepsi during his U.S. visit in 1959.

He also claims that the CIA spiked Khrushchev's food with laxatives to ensure the abundance of research data. It is unclear how the retired KGB veteran came in possession of this information, but it is worth mentioning that at a press conference following Camp David, Khrushchev acknowledged that he had been "enriched" by his visit and that his talks with Eisenhower had helped both men "understand each other better."

A similar story allegedly happened during Leonid Brezhnev's American trip in 1973.

Atamanenko doesn't say how he knows this, but we found circumstantial evidence in the U.S. media reports about a noticeable chemistry and even bromance between Brezhnev and Richard Nixon.

What had prompted Nixon to discover a soulmate in the Soviet leader is anyone's guess, but the KGB veteran's revelations may finally put this issue to rest.

Atamanenko provides no comment on the reasons why Ronald Reagan walked out of negotiations on strategic missiles with Mikhail Gorbachev during the 1986 summit in Reykjavik, but in light of this new information we may deduce that Gorbachev's stool sample that day posed a serious security risk.

The veteran Soviet agent finishes his story with a tale about the six golden toilets in the residence of Hafez al-Assad, former Syrian ruler and father of today's Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad. Only after Hafez al-Assad's death in 2000 did the Syrian intelligence discover that the toilets had been designed to separate the fluids from the solids, and contained a vacuum mechanism that sucked out the content and prepared it for the "dead drop." Russian intelligence, which is said to be involved in this discovery, pointed the finger at Israel and the CIA, but it's also possible they were simply cleaning up their own mess.

While both the FSB and CIA can neither confirm nor deny that they spent decades examining each other's feces, the public can always rely on applicable common-sense rules: who observed it served it, who deduced it produced it, who denied it supplied it, and who smelt it dealt it.

No matter how touching we may find the vision of a world whose leaders learn about each other's personalities from each other's excrement, let's keep in mind that the story of the American research into the Soviet leaders' stool samples may well be a "journalistic deodorant" sprayed over Stalin's "fecal espionage" story when it leaked to the media. Russian officials have the penchant for preemptive damage control by polluting the media narrative with manufactured counter-narrative, making up nonsensical chaff stories that compete for attention on equal terms with objective reality. This way, even when the stolen stool hits the fan, they can always say, "everybody's doing it."

And yet we can't help but wonder: what exactly is happening during the prolonged negotiations in Geneva - and could more fiber in the menu expedite the process?

In particular, how exactly did the U.S. and the Iranian delegations test each other's mettle during the recent nuclear talks in Paris, and what did John Kerry and Barack Obama find out about the Iranians that convinced them they can be trusted to hold up their end of the bargain?

And finally, in the pre-computer age, how would a whistleblower like Snowden go about exposing such a dirty government secret to the public? And even if he managed to steal what we might now call the "data dump" in its physical form and gave it to a Wikileaks-type organization, how would that outfit go about blasting it all over the world? The more I think about it, the more grateful I am for living in the modern digital age.

My Our ENTIRE beet-kollecktiv has volunteered - UNANIMOUSLY! - to analyze every dungheap that may be attributed to any "world-leader" in any degree! (My Our kollecktiv is Filled With Revolutionary Zeal, DA? Also, they all know What Is Good For Them - And Their Families...) Then We Will find ANSWERS to all political questions, DA?!?!?

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand

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